What is the point of GM's notes?

[Fenris-77]

That all makes sense.

Let me ask you something (and this may seem like an odd question from viewers afar) - disconnected from player input and the table-facing dynamics which you went through above.

There is a lot of celebration of both elaborate world-building and theatricality + heavy exposition dumps in D&D culture and feel/immersion being downstream of that. If my GMing style was extremely theatrical with elaborate exposition dumps, would that have enhanced or detracted from all the things you mentioned above? What I'm asking is "does GMing with theatrical and elaborate exposition dumps vs pithy (both in terms of theatrics and word count) and provocative framing" have impact on (a) play broadly and (b) this kind of play specifically?

And how would players who are used to (and feel they are moved/compelled by) GMing with theatrical and elaborate exposition dumps in their framing feel about the different kind of framing that we're discussing here?

Theatrical GMing and info dumps are mostly not useful in Blades as they tend to interfere with the recursive process, either via time (info dumps) or register (theatricality). Those things are great in other games sometimes, but not in Blades IMO. Pithy and provocative framing is a pretty succinct description of what GMing Blades should look like. You need the recursive process operating at high speeds to get the most out of the mechanics in Blades, so anything that runs counter to that is suboptimal, IMO.

As I said above, a main ingredient that replaces those two things in a game of Blades is player activity and ownership of consequences. What that lacks is the element of being entertained that I think characterizes those two play elements, from the player side, obviously. I found initially with Blades, as would many people I suspect, that the game asks a lot more from the players than some other games. and that takes some getting used to and won't be to everyone's taste either.

 

[Manbearcat]

I'll go ahead and do a quick steelman of where I think a large cross-section of D&D players would have trouble with a Dungeon World, Dogs in the Vineyard, or Blades in the Dark game that I ran for them:

* Table-facing action resolution, setting/faction/conflict clocks, leading a distributed authority conversation regarding content generation vs GM-facing and overwhelmingly GM-exclusive content generation.

* Pithy (with very little theatrics) and provocative framing vs theatricality-heavy and exposition-heavy framing.

* No myth setting with collective world-building vs high resolution, steeped-in-history/lore, pregenerated setting.

* The sheer energy and responsibility required to respond steadily and creatively with the questions/provocations put before you in the content generating conversation.

---

Now I don't think those players are wired that way inherently (meaning their neurological hardware is cemented). With enough exposure and play, I think its extremely likely that the bulk of them would experience/develop a cognitive toggle. Not all, but a large number of them.

 

[Manbearcat]

Theatrical GMing and info dumps are mostly not useful in Blades as they tend to interfere with the recursive process, either via time (info dumps) or register (theatricality). Those things are great in other games sometimes, but not in Blades IMO. Pithy and provocative framing is a pretty succinct description of what GMing Blades should look like. You need the recursive process operating at high speeds to get the most out of the mechanics in Blades, so anything that runs counter to that is suboptimal, IMO.

As I said above, a main ingredient that replaces those two things in a game of Blades is player activity and ownership of consequences. What that lacks is the element of being entertained that I think characterizes those two play elements, from the player side, obviously. I found initially with Blades, as would many people I suspect, that the game asks a lot more from the players than some other games. and that takes some getting used to and won't be to everyone's taste either.

Assuming deftness of play and that the chemistry between the participants isn't inherently bad, do you think its that energy, pacing, and flow (and the way the mechanics are tightly integrated as a feedback loop -feeding into and emerging from play) that do the heavy lifting of the immersive quality of play?

Put another way, do you think folks that feel they would be distracted by all of this stuff would inherently find their distractions falling away because its impossible not to get swept up by this?

 

[Fenris-77]

Assuming deftness of play and that the chemistry between the participants isn't inherently bad, do you think its that energy, pacing, and flow (and the way the mechanics are tightly integrated as a feedback loop -feeding into and emerging from play) that do the heavy lifting of the immersive quality of play?

Put another way, do you think folks that feel they would be distracted by all of this stuff would inherently find their distractions falling away because its impossible not to get swept up by this?

Pretty much, yeah. In more traditional games immersion comes from action declaration and exposition (which is fine), but Blades does it differently. The mechanics and pacing of the game itself, in the form of the feedback loop, are designed to foster that feeling of being swept away. Without having playing a game like Blades its almost impossible, from the traditional D&D/OSR perspective, to envision what the difference is. The mechanics look one way when you're just reading them, and another way entirely when you're not just playing them, but playing them with some confidence. This reminds me of some of the prefatory material in Burning Wheel where Luke Crane is up front about the game needing some time and attention to really make fly.

 

[Bedrockgames]

The big problem for me is what I've bolded in the snippet above---namely, it's almost impossible for me as a GM, even with the absolute best intentions, to remain fully neutral/impartial/fair within all of the parameters available.

no one in their right minds would state a GM is remaining fully neutral. No one is truly objective. Objectivity, neutrality and fairness are ideals people strive for and there are referees who are closer to this ideal than others (just like there are more impartial and fair referees in professional sports). The fact that neutrality is a difficult goal, doesn't make it one not worth striving for. Throwing up our hands and 'saying it's impossible!" simply isn't the right reaction when there is clearly a difference between a GM who makes serious effort to be neutral and one who regularly favors Brett because he likes Brett and thinks everyone else at the table is a loser. The point of cultivating these kinds of skills is to be able to discern when you are not being fair, when your impartiality is being influenced by something like that.

 

[innerdude]

One of the beauties of playing a game like Blades, with all it's authorial permissions, is when you're playing it with a group of likeminded and engaged players (that includes the GM). So this scene above developed out of the snowball of our player decisions and the consequences thereof not just from the session in question, but from several previous sessions. This is true of idea level content, but also in the mechanical decisions we made as players, fully aware of what the fallout could be for failure or complication. Throughout those sessions, both @hawkeyefan and I made strong authorial contributions to the game, both in and out of character. The framing of our Blades game is strongly recursive, by which I mean that the ideas bounce back and forth across the table at high speed with everyone bumping and setting ideas and consequences like pros. That gets back to @Manbearcat who does the actual scene framing, and the result is an encounter that is strongly welded to the characters involved, which in turn leads to player investment and, dare I say it, even immersion. So even as the non-present observer in this scene I found it enormously engaging and immersive, aided by the fact that I was peripherally involved of course, from a distance.

So much this. All of this. All of it. All of the "this" that can be placed thusly.

This is EXACTLY what's happening in my Ironsworn campaign. Couldn't have described it better if I'd spent a week trying.

The kind of immersion and engagement I'm describing here is different from the kind you get in a GM notes game. Not better, or worse, just different. There's a stronger connection directly to the mechanics of the game and player decision making, where in, say, D&D or OSR play the connection tends to be to the GMs adjudication rather than actual mechanics, which feels different in play. Both are good of course, they just play to different kinds of player engagement and expectations. I can't imagine anyone playing the series of session in question and not enjoying themselves immensely, but with different expectations and play priorities I'm sure it's possible.

Again, so much this. One of the things I wanted focus on in a breakout thread around actor stance / "playing from only character view" is to present a view much like this.

As for why someone might not enjoy it, several possibilities occur to me. Some players are uncomfortable with the idea of playing outside their character, which is fine and very common, but it doesn't produce the play I describe above. Some players are also not comfortable being as active as hawkeyefan and I are as players - there's no room for sitting back and enjoying the ride in Blades, it's hands on the wheel at all times. Beyond this, Blades puts a lot more of of the responsibility for consequences on the players because those consequences are often player facing, and not everyone is comfortable with that level of responsibility. I've termed this in positive terms on the Blades side, but I want to be clear that not wanting any of the above things isn't bad, weak, wrong or anything else negative.

Very much this too. Three of my Ironsworn players have grasped onto this with vigor, and are getting paid back in return. One player is by default a more . . . cautious player, largely the result of decades of "GM force" play in D&D 3.5 being beaten into him.

 

[Manbearcat]

I wonder if Emikol, Lanefan et al (and their players) would describe their play by the sort of "collective flow state" that is being depicted above; I suspect not. If not, I wonder if the source of being incredulous at the cognitive state that has been depicted in these kinds of games (which advocates say enhances their immersion rather than detracts) is because of an expectation of a discretized agency/cognitive position.

Then I wonder if the "4e Warlords suck because they're ordering around my PC" is an inevitable outgrowth of this (eg rather than finding a way to achieve cognitive unity and make all of this work, or politely decline the synergy, there is offense at the sense of encroachment on someone's domain).

 

[Fenris-77]

I wonder if Emikol, Lanefan et al (and their players) would describe their play by the sort of "collective flow state" that is being depicted above; I suspect not. If not, I wonder if the source of being incredulous at the cognitive state that has been depicted in these kinds of games (which advocates say enhances their immersion rather than detracts) is because of an expectation of a discretized agency/cognitive position.

Then I wonder if the "4e Warlords suck because they're ordering around my PC" is an inevitable outgrowth of this.

I think that D&D style characters are far more siloed than characters in Blades. Character's in D&D have very little mechanical effect on each other and as a result have a significantly different (and larger) cognitive distance from each other. Blades, on the other hand, demands that the players work as an actual team, in mechanical terms, at least some of the time. I might call the resulting difference immersion in the game (Blades) rather than strictly immersion in the character (D&D), although the former certainly includes the latter.

Edit: sorry, forgot the actual point, which is that the team approach really obviates the preciousness you sometimes see about character control and autonomy you see in conversations about traditional games.

 

[hawkeyefan]

When Haight was investigating the "site-of-the-murder-scene" haunted Union Hall or dealing with "Ghost Field Manifested Storm" with the child poltergeist who threw the incorporeal ball at your feet and expected you to "play with him", how did you (the person playing) feel (because so much focus has been put on "feel") and why? However you felt, it certainly wasn't due to some elaborate, purple prose-ey exposition dump on my end.

When the ghost kid's ball landed at my feet, as a player I felt a sense of....excitement, I think is probably best. A little thrill at something so creepy and immediately engaging. I knew this was going to be a tipping point of some sort. Here was something that needed to be dealt with, and depending on how it went, things could proceed in drastically different directions. It was a tense moment.

I would agree that the feeling I had wasn't really about the prose you used to set the scene....I think the description was very straightforward rather than evocative.

I'd be curious to hear the answers framed by (a) stance, (b) situation framing, (c) mechanics (all of it including potential action resolution fallout and snowballing in a direction different from where it went in our game), and (d) "<adjectives> world."

I'd say that my engagement with the scene was also so strong because it was connected to my character's interests. He has a scientific interest in the arcane, and this was his first really significant foray into dealing with ghosts and the like. It spoke to the character.

It also allowed my to use the gadget my character has created (one of my significant choices during character creation), his "ghost gloves", which gave me the idea to simply interact with the spectral ball and "throw" it back to the kid. But, deciding to bring those to bear actually made it a bit more risky because they have a drawback of being "volatile" and possibly attracting unwanted spectral consequences. So the ghost gloves having that quality meant that I knew using them as a part of the solution to the situation meant that if it went wrong, it would have been that much worse.

The entire scenario, from beginning to end, had that feel to it. I was very aware I was in dangerous territory, and pretty obviously out of my character's depth, and at any moment things could have went horribly wrong. All of it felt genuine to the fictional world we'd established, and the situation you described, and my character's place in it.

If you had to guess why you guys felt way x and why someone else (like @Emerikol ) might feel way y about these moments, what would you attribute that to (with respect to the above)?

I don't want to say what @Emerikol may feel about it, but I can say that I felt the world and the scenario had depth, and I felt immersed in the situation as my character. I don't think that any of this suffered from a lot of the details clearly arising only through play and not being decided ahead of time.

I know that at one point earlier in my life as a player/GM....even only about 5 years ago.....I likely would have balked at this to some extent, but I think that's largely due to the phenomenon that @Arilyn just mentioned when we find ourselves in an RPG that clearly requires prep of some sort, and the GM has not done any, and so they're struggling to riff on the fly using a system that's not designed to support that, for players who likely weren't expecting that. I've been in those games and they can be frustrating.

But playing with a system and processes that actively support and promote this kind of play, and with people who are comfortable with it and who clearly enjoy it, like you and @Fenris-77 , it works quite well. The world feels as real as any I experienced in my younger days, and my character feels like a natural and unique part of that world.

 

[Manbearcat]

I think that D&D style characters are far more siloed than characters in Blades. Character's in D&D have very little mechanical effect on each other and as a result have a significantly different (and larger) cognitive distance from each other. Blades, on the other hand, demands that the players work as an actual team, in mechanical terms, at least some of the time. I might call the resulting difference immersion in the game (Blades) rather than strictly immersion in the character (D&D), although the former certainly includes the latter.

Edit: sorry, forgot the actual point, which is that the team approach really obviates the preciousness you sometimes see about character control and autonomy you see in conversations about traditional games.

And again (back to the 4e Warlord), I wonder if these trad D&D predilections were (as would be with Blades) one of the issues that a certain subset of the D&D culture had with 4e (where team thematic and tactical synergy are collected rather than distributed).